Many pharmaceutical solutions and suspensions on an industrial scale rely upon highly-controlled, thorough mixing to achieve desired distribution of ingredients in a final product. Agitator tanks are frequently used to complete the mixing processes. Also mechanical stirrers or impellers are also frequently used. Typically, the mechanical stirrers or impellers are lowered into the fluid through an opening in the top of the vessel and rotated by an external motor to create a mixing action.
Substantial operational procedures are employed to make sure that such techniques do not suffer from drawbacks of contamination and/or leakage during the mixing. Otherwise, the rod carrying the mixing blades or impeller introduced into the vessel would introduce bacteria or other contaminants, which would lead to degradation of the product. Corresponding efforts are employed in applications involving hazardous or toxic fluids, or suspensions of pathogenic organisms.
Consumable bags have been used to further augment such issues. Some known systems rely upon magnetically-driven impellers and/or immobile spurge discs contained within the consumable bags. Further improvements to the design, efficiency and operation of such consumable bags and the features operating in conjunction with such consumable bags continue to be a desirable goal.
A plunge-mixing bag arrangement and a plunge-mixing system that show one or more improvements in comparison to the prior art would be desirable in the art.